The Caller Read online

  ‘The option you were looking at,’ she clarified, sensing Hunter’s confusion and pointing at the machine with her empty coffee mug. ‘The Caramel Frappuccino Deluxe? That one’s excessively sweet, so unless that’s your thing, I wouldn’t go there.’

  Hunter hadn’t realized that he’d been checking the selection so attentively.

  ‘I’d say that sweet isn’t the only thing it excels at then,’ he replied, quickly peeking over his shoulder. ‘Ten bucks for a cup of coffee?’

  Her lips parted into an agreeing smile that was both charming and shy.

  ‘I’ve seen you here in the library before,’ she said, moving the subject away from ‘sweet and expensive coffees’. ‘Are you a student here at UCLA?’

  Hunter regarded the woman in front of him for an extra moment. Age-wise, it was hard to place her. She carried herself with the pride and authority of a head-of-state, but her delicate features could belong to a college senior. Her voice also gave little away, bearing a gentle, girlish tone combined with enough self-assurance to disarm the most confident of guesses.

  ‘No,’ Hunter replied, honestly amused by her question. He knew that he looked nothing like a college student anymore. ‘My student days are well and truly over. I just . . .’ His eyes moved past her and on to the reading room. ‘Like coming here at night. I like the serenity of this place.’

  His answer brought a new smile to the woman’s lips.

  ‘I guess I know what you mean,’ she said, as she turned and allowed her gaze to follow Hunter’s through the doors and into the large reading room, transitioning from the checkered wooden floor to the dark mahogany tables, and finally to the large, gothic-styled windows. ‘Plus,’ she added, ‘I also like the smell of this place.’

  Hunter frowned at her.

  Her head tilted sideways slightly as she explained. ‘I always thought that if you could put a scent to knowledge, this would be it, don’t you think? A combination of paper, both old and new, leather, mahogany . . .’ Her quick pause was shadowed by a shrug. ‘Overpriced coffees, and students’ stale sweat.’

  This time Hunter returned her smile. He liked her sense of humor.

  ‘I’m Tracy,’ she said, offering her hand. ‘Tracy Adams.’

  ‘Robert Hunter. Pleasure to meet you.’

  Despite her delicate hands, her handshake was firm and strong.

  ‘Please,’ Hunter said, taking a step to his right as he nodded, first at Tracy’s empty coffee mug then at the vending machine. ‘Be my guest.’

  ‘Oh no, you were here first,’ Tracy replied. ‘I’m in no rush.’

  ‘It’s OK, really, I’m still deciding,’ Hunter lied. He only drank black, unsweetened coffee.

  ‘Oh, OK. In that case, thank you.’ Tracy stepped up to the machine, placed her mug on the designated spot, slotted some coins into it and made her selection – regular black. No sugar.

  ‘So, how are the classes going so far?’ Hunter asked.

  ‘Oh no,’ Tracy replied, collecting her mug and turning to face him. ‘I’m not a student here either.’

  Hunter nodded. ‘I know. You’re a professor, right?’

  Tracy looked at him curiously and with an intense, searching gaze, but his expression revealed nothing at all. That just served to intrigue her further.

  ‘That’s right, I am, but how did you know?’

  Hunter tried to shrug it off. ‘Oh, just a guess, really.’

  Tracy didn’t buy it.

  ‘No way.’

  She quickly thought back to the leather-bound volumes she had on her table. None of their titles really hinted at her occupation, and even if they did, Hunter would’ve needed super-human vision to be able to read them from where he’d been sitting, or as he walked past her table.

  ‘That was too confident a statement for it to be a guess. Somehow you already knew. How?’ The look in her eyes was now very skeptical.

  ‘Just simple observation,’ Hunter replied, but before he could develop his answer any further, he felt his cellphone vibrate inside his jacket pocket. He reached for it and checked the display screen.

  ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ he said, bringing the phone to his ear. ‘Detective Hunter, Homicide Special.’

  Tracy’s eyebrows arched. She wasn’t expecting that. A few seconds later she saw his whole expression change.

  ‘OK,’ Hunter said into his cellphone, checking his watch – 1:14 a.m. ‘I’m on my way.’ He disconnected and looked back at Tracy. ‘It really was a pleasure to meet you. Enjoy your coffee.’

  Tracy hesitated for an instant.

  ‘You forgot your book,’ she called out after him, but Hunter was already halfway down the stairs.

  Three

  The LAPD’s Homicide Special Section (HSS) was an elite branch of its Robbery Homicide Division. It had been created to deal solely with serial and high-profile homicide cases, and cases requiring extensive investigative time and expertise. Due to Hunter’s criminal behavior psychology background and the fact that Los Angeles seemed to attract a particular breed of sociopaths, he was placed in an even more specialized entity within the HSS. All homicides where overwhelming brutality and/or sadism had been used by the perpetrator were tagged by the department as UVC – Ultra Violent Crimes. Robert Hunter and his partner, Carlos Garcia, were the HSS UVC Unit.

  The address Hunter was given took him to Long Beach, more specifically, to a three-story, terracotta building that was sandwiched between a drugstore and a corner house. Even at that time in the morning, and taking the fastest route possible, it took him nearly an hour to cover the thirty-five miles from the UCLA Campus in Westwood to the Harbor.

  He saw the concentration of black and white units as soon as he exited Redondo Avenue and turned left on to East Broadway. A section of the Broadway had already been cordoned off by Long Beach PD. Garcia’s metallic-blue Honda Civic was parked just across the road from the three-story building, by a white forensics-unit van.

  Hunter had to slow down to an almost crawl as he approached the cordoned-off area. In a city that barely slept, it was no surprise that a small crowed of curious onlookers had already gathered by the police tape. Most of them had their arms extended above their heads, filming away on their cellphones or tablet devices, as if they were at some sort of musical concert, all of them hoping for at least a glimpse of something. And the more gruesome the better.

  Once he finally cleared the crowd, Hunter displayed his credentials to the two uniformed officers by the black and yellow crime-scene tape and parked just next to his partner’s car. As he stepped out of his beat-up Buick LeSabre, he stretched his six-foot frame against the cold early-morning wind. Menacing, dense clouds had covered the sky, hiding the stars and adding a new layer of darkness to the night. Hunter clipped his badge on to his belt and looked around slowly. The road segment that had been cordoned off by the police was about one hundred yards long, running from the intersection with Newport Avenue, all the way to Loma, the next avenue along.

  The first thought that came to Hunter was that the location provided a wide selection of escape routes, with a major freeway less than a mile and a half away. But it really didn’t matter if the perpetrator was driving or not, anonymously disappearing down any of those roads wouldn’t have been a problem for anyone.

  Garcia, who had been standing by a black and white unit, talking to an officer from the Long Beach Police Department, had spotted Hunter’s car as it cleared the crime-scene tape.

  ‘Robert,’ he called as he crossed the road.

  Hunter turned to face his partner.

  Garcia’s longish brown hair was pulled back into a sleek ponytail. He wore dark trousers with a crisp light-blue shirt underneath a black jacket. Though he seemed wide-awake and his attire could’ve come straight out of a dry cleaner’s, his eyes looked tired and bloodshot. Unlike Hunter, Garcia usually slept well at night. Tonight, though, he’d been asleep for only two hours before he was dragged out of bed by an LAPD phone call.

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nbsp; ‘Carlos,’ Hunter said, greeting his partner with a head gesture. ‘Sorry about the early call, buddy. So what have we got?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet,’ Garcia replied with a subtle headshake. ‘I got here a couple of minutes before you did. I was just trying to find out who the officer in change was when I saw you clear the police line.’

  Hunter’s gaze moved from his partner and refocused on the person approaching them from behind Garcia. He was coming from the terracotta building.

  ‘I guess he found us,’ Hunter said.

  Garcia turned on the balls of his feet.

  ‘You guys from Ultra Violent Crimes?’ the man asked in a voice clearly battered by years of cigarette smoking. The embroidered chevrons on the upper sleeves of his jacket told Hunter and Garcia that he was a second-level sergeant with the Long Beach Police Department. He looked to be in his late forties or early fifties. His thick peppery hair was brushed back off his high forehead, revealing a small jagged scar just above his left eyebrow. He spoke with a light Mexican accent.

  ‘That’s correct,’ Hunter replied as he and Garcia stepped forward to meet him. They all introduced themselves with firm handshakes. The sergeant’s name was Manuel Velasquez.

  ‘So what have we got here, Sergeant?’ Garcia asked.

  Sergeant Velasquez chuckled at the question, but it was a nervous, full-of-hesitation chuckle.

  ‘I’m not really sure I could describe what’s in there in words,’ he replied, turning to face the building behind him. ‘I’m not sure anyone can. You guys are going to have to go see it for yourselves.’

  Four

  Guided by a gust of autumn wind, which had strengthened considerably in the past couple of minutes, the cluster of heavy clouds above them had thickened, and as Hunter, Garcia and Velasquez began walking towards the terracotta building, the first drops of rain splashed against their heads and the dry asphalt.

  ‘The victim’s name was Karen Ward,’ Sergeant Velasquez announced, picking up the pace to escape the rain and leading Hunter and Garcia up the few concrete steps that led to the building’s entrance door. Instead of relying on memory, he reached for his notepad and flipped it open. ‘She was twenty-four years old, single and worked as a cosmetologist in a beauty spa on East Second Street.’ Instinctively he indicated east. ‘Not that far from here, actually. She’d been living in this building for only four months.’

  ‘Rented?’ Garcia asked as they entered the building.

  ‘That’s right. The owner and landlady is one . . .’ He flipped a page on his notepad. ‘Nancy Rogers, resident of Torrance, in South Bay.’

  ‘Burglary?’ Hunter this time.

  An uneasy shake of the head from Velasquez.

  ‘Nope, and the perpetrator didn’t even try to make it look like one. No apparent sign of a break-in or a struggle either. Her handbag was found on the sofa in the living room. Her purse was inside it with two credit cards and eighty-seven dollars in cash. Her car keys were also inside her bag. Her laptop was in her bedroom, where we also found a few pieces of jewelry on top of a dresser. Wardrobes, drawers, cabinets . . . nothing seems to have been touched.’

  At the building’s front door, the only security the place seemed to offer its residents came in the shape of an old intercom entry system. There were no CCTV cameras.

  ‘Did she live alone?’

  ‘That’s correct,’ the sergeant replied with nod.

  With the building offering no elevator, Hunter and Garcia followed Velasquez up a second set of stairs and then a third to the top floor.

  ‘I’ve had cops on every floor doing a door-to-door,’ Sergeant Velasquez informed them. ‘Nothing.’ He made a not very surprised face. ‘Nobody saw or heard anything.’

  ‘Not even her next-door neighbor?’ Hunter asked.

  The sergeant shook his head. ‘Her next-door neighbors are a middle-aged couple,’ Velasquez explained. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Santiago. They both have hearing problems. I talked to them myself, but even with the loud knocks, it took Mr. Santiago almost an hour to answer the door, and he only did it because he got up in the middle of the night to take a leak, that was when he heard us knocking.’

  The stairs led them to a long and narrow corridor, now brightly lit by powerful forensics spotlights. Karen Ward’s apartment was number 305, the last one on the right. Nicholas Holden, one of the CSI team’s fingerprint experts, was kneeling outside her front door, busy dusting it for latent prints.

  ‘You mentioned that she was single,’ Garcia said as they made their way down the corridor.

  ‘She was,’ Velasquez confirmed.

  ‘Do you know if she was seeing anyone? Had a boyfriend?’

  The sergeant knew exactly why Garcia had asked that question – a young woman is brutally murdered inside her own apartment without any apparent motive and no signs of a break-in, and the names that will comprise the initial ‘person of interest list’ will belong mainly to the people with whom the victim might’ve had any sort of romantic involvement in the past few years. In the USA, so called ‘crimes of passion’ account for over half of violent homicides committed against women.

  ‘Sorry, Detective, but we didn’t have time to gather that sort of information.’ The sergeant clarified, glancing at his watch. ‘The truth is, we were able to find out very little about the victim and what happened in her apartment before it was confirmed that this investigation was to be passed on to the LAPD’s UVC Unit.’ He paused and turned to face both detectives. ‘Frankly, those kind of decisions usually piss me off. This is our jurisdiction, so this should be our investigation, comprendes? We’re not “little league” over here. But this case had Violent Crimes Unit written all over it from the get-go, so we were all expecting it anyway.’ He showed Hunter and Garcia his palms in a surrender gesture. ‘And in this case, you’ll get no complaints from me, or any of my men. You want that evil in there . . . you won’t have to ask twice. It’s all yours.’

  Hunter and Garcia were now frowning at Velasquez.

  ‘Hold on a sec,’ Garcia said. ‘What do you mean – “this case had Violent Crimes Unit written all over it from the get-go”?’

  The sergeant’s stare moved from Garcia to Hunter and then back to Garcia. ‘You weren’t told about the phone call?’

  The reply from both detectives came in the form of inquisitive silence.

  ‘Oh, man!’ Sergeant Velasquez looked down at the floor while shaking his head. ‘OK,’ he began. ‘Nine-one-one received a call from a semi-hysterical woman at around eleven-twenty last night. The woman was making very little sense, but she was screaming the word “murder”. As we all know, that’s a “red flag”. The call was transferred to our precinct and then to my desk.’

  ‘So you talked to her yourself?’ Garcia asked.

  The sergeant nodded. ‘And she was indeed hysterical, claiming that someone had murdered her best friend right in front of her eyes.’ He paused, lifting his right index finger as he clarified. ‘Well, not exactly right in front of her eyes, but she was allowed to . . . or better yet, forced to watch it via a video-call.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Garcia’s unsure look had quickly turned into a confused one.

  ‘You heard right, Detective. The woman was yelling down the phone, claiming that some psycho had called her from Miss Ward’s cellphone, and forced her to play some sort of game, in which her friend’s life depended on it.’

  ‘A game?’ Hunter this time.

  ‘That’s what she said, yes. Look, I don’t know the specifics because, as I’ve said, the woman was going hysterical. The first thing I needed to do was follow protocol and send a black-and-white unit down here to check on the alleged murder victim, a Miss Karen Ward. A couple of uniforms drove by just before midnight and guess what? The door was unlocked. They walked in to check on her and . . . you guys being here is the result.’

  ‘You said that this hysterical woman claimed to be the victim’s best friend?’ Garcia asked.

  Velasquez nodded. ‘
Her name is Tanya Kaitlin. I have her details back in my vehicle. I’ll get them all to you before you go.’

  As Hunter, Garcia and Velasquez finally reached apartment 305, Hunter greeted the CSI fingerprint expert. ‘Hey, Nick.’

  ‘Hey guys,’ the agent replied robotically.

  After signing the crime-scene manifesto, Hunter, Garcia and Velasquez were handed a disposable white Tyvek jumpsuit each, together with a pair of latex gloves. As they began suiting up, Hunter noticed the fire exit door at the end of the corridor, past Karen Ward’s apartment.

  ‘Where does that lead to, do you know?’

  ‘Metal stairs that will take you down to an alleyway at the back of the building,’ Velasquez explained. ‘Go left and you’ll come out on Newport Avenue. Go right and you’re on Loma Avenue.’

  Before zipping up his jumpsuit, Hunter walked over to the exit door to have a better look at it. The internal push bar on the fire resistant door indicated that it could only be opened from his side. It would offer no access into the building, but coming from apartment 305 it would’ve provided a much faster exit route than tracking back down the corridor all the way to the concrete staircase at the other end.

  Hunter pushed the bar down, unlocking the door. Not a sound. The door wasn’t alarmed. As he turned to face the door to apartment 305 again, he noticed the CSI agent tilting his head to one side first, staring at the door, then tilting it to the other side and staring at it again.